Day 4. Santa Rosa, canopy and suspension briges

Submitted by maria on Tue, 13/09/2022 - 10:27

Like every day we get up almost at dawn. At 6.30 the woman is already preparing breakfast, gallo pinto and gallo de salchichón. This woman is a real charmer.

Arenal volcano

We say goodbye to the owners, they have beautiful flowers in the garden and tell us about them.

Gallo pinto

Gallo de salchichón

Today our destination is Santa Rosa, we have almost three hours to go. The scenery around the Tenorio Volcano National Park is breathtaking.

Owner

We stop at the Bijagua petrol station to fill up, a litre of petrol at 956 colones, a little cheaper than in Spain. They accept credit cards but only colones.

We continue our journey on highway 1, which is under construction at several points, it seems that they are widening the motorway although there are no tolls. We take a detour to the left to take highway 145 and then highway 606 towards Santa Elena.

Zopilote

The road starts to get complicated. It is a mountain pass with a lot of potholes and areas of track where the tarmac has been lost. Fortunately it is not raining although it is very cloudy.

Santa Elena is a small town with all services, banks, supermarkets, cafes, restaurants and sodas, mountain clothes shops.... We stayed at Mora's Place B&B. It has parking and a shared kitchen next to a terrace with stunning views of the cloud forest.

Mora´s B&B

We have booked canopy and suspension bridges with the company Selvatura and they pick us up from our accommodation at 12.30. Although it has been raining since 12 o'clock it seems that it is not enough to cancel the activity and we go to the reserve.

We are a group of 6 people. One of the couples is from Madrid and they are lovely, Esther and David, how wonderful to have shared this moment with you.

Selvatura

Selvatura offers several types of canopy tours over primary tree canopy, we chose normal canopy without superman (we already had that experience in Colombia) and hanging bridges.

Joaquin prefers to do the bridges and loves it. The Treetop Walkways is a 3kms walk through the cloud forest combining trails and 8 suspension bridges from 50 meters to 170 meters in length. A unique and wonderful experience to enjoy another perspective of nature.

Selvatura

The canopy consists of 13 cables, one of them 1 km long, 15 platforms and a Tarzan Swing. In total 3.5 km of pure fun. For this you have harness, dissipator and brake glove, although we didn't have to use them as they have manual brakes. Flying over the trees is amazing even if it's raining.

The guides are lovely and you laugh a lot with them.

Suspension bridge

The Tarzan Swing experience, incredible, total adrenaline rush. You literally feel like Tarzan. You can add more excitement by hiring a superman for 11$ more to go down the last 1km cable, as we had already had that experience we preferred to continue with the conventional zip line, but it looked very good too.

Suspension bridge

Recommendations. If it rains like it did in our case, we recommend that you wear light, easy-drying clothes and normal shoes (not goretex because the water gets inside and then it is impossible to dry them). Mackintoshes are not usually able to withstand this amount of water and as it is not usually cold, even if you wear them, wear swimming clothes underneath, a thin T-shirt and thin trousers, but not too short, remember that you have to put on the harness and it can hurt you.

Suspension bridge

Back to our hotel, shower and try to dry our clothes as best we can. Although the temperature is about 20 degrees the humidity makes the wind chill drop.

We buy some hamburgers in the supermarket and in a nearby restaurant and have dinner in the lodge overlooking the cloud forest.